Robotic surgical systems have been used in minimally invasive medical procedures. During a medical procedure, the robotic surgical system is controlled by a surgeon interfacing with a user interface. The user interface allows the surgeon to manipulate an end effector that acts on a patient. The user interface includes an input controller or handle that is moveable by the surgeon to control the robotic surgical system.
Robotic surgical systems typically used a scaling factor to scale down the motions of the surgeons hands to determine the desired position of the end effector within the patient so that the surgeon could more precisely move the end effector inside the patient. However, the larger the scaling factor, the farther the surgeon had to move the input device handle to move the end effector the same distance. Since the input device handle has a fixed range of motion, this meant that for larger scaling factors the surgeon may have reached an end of the range of motion of an input handle more often. The surgeon then had to “clutch” the handle to decouple the motion of the input handles from the end effector so that the surgeon could move the handles to a new position within the workspace of the user interface away from the end of the range motion while the instruments remain stationary. Once the input handle was moved sufficiently away from the end of the range of motion, the surgeon “reclutched” the input handle with the end effector to recouple the motion of the input handle to motion of the end effector to complete the desired movement of the end effector. This clutching process is time consuming and distracting to surgeons.
There is a need for robotic surgical system that is able to scale down input handle movements of the surgeon while also reducing or eliminating the need for a surgeon to clutch or move the input handles away from an end of their range of motion during robotic surgical procedures.